Officer Sees Results in Crime-Fighting Effort : Police: Success in driving activity out of Harbor City business area on PCH spurs plans to expand.

Fifty Harbor City businesses as diverse as McDonald’s restaurant and Joker’s Wild Tattoo shop have joined forces with the LAPD’s new Harbor City lead officer to drive criminal activities out of the business area on Pacific Coast Highway.

With the business owners’ backing, Officer Donald Jenks initiated several days of LAPD operations involving up to 45 officers, who made arrests and issued citations and warnings.

“In just one month, (crime) had gone down,” said Jenks, who was transferred to Harbor City after serving as senior lead officer in San Pedro for 12 years.

Officers also took day laborers to the city-sponsored pickup point down the street in Harbor Park. Business owners had complained that the workers loitering outside their storefronts deterred customers.

Ping Own, who has owned Ping’s Auto Service for eight years, said nearly all of the prostitutes, dope dealers and day laborers who used to hang out in the area were gone.

“For years (authorities) said there was nothing they could do about it,” Own said. “We changed the face of the street.”

Now Jenks wants to expand the police-community cooperation that has improved the Pacific Coast Highway district to fight crime in other areas of Harbor City.

Crime in one neighborhood just blocks from the business area frightens some residents so much that on Halloween, a woman was seen walking with the arm of her trick-or-treating child in one hand and a can of Mace in the other.

Then came another parent, with a baseball bat perched in the back of his baby stroller, said resident Nick Chinetti.

The crackle of gunfire is common in the neighborhood around 253rd Street and Belleporte Avenue, residents say. Gang members, prostitutes and crack dealers are attracted by five abandoned buildings near the corner. Activities have worsened during the past 18 months as promises by Los Angeles city officials to demolish the fire-gutted, one-story apartments have fallen through, Chinetti said.

“We could go over there and make arrests all day, but the key is to knock (the buildings) down,” Jenks said. It would “eliminate a lot of police time.”

Richard C. Sanchez, chief building inspector in the Building and Safety Department’s Bureau of Community Safety, said the buildings will be torn down and the property fenced by the end of the month.

A nuisance abatement official, who did not want to be identified, said the city has been tied up in litigation with the property owner and it is overloaded with hundreds of similar cases in Los Angeles.

Community activists have long complained that authorities ignore Harbor City. They cite their efforts to get the buildings torn down, and point out that just one patrol car is assigned to the community from the LAPD’s Harbor Division.

But Jenks said he will work to get more police on the beat in the community. “We have to stay on top of it,” he said.

A new LAPD Harbor City Community Service Center, which opened at 1522 W. Pacific Coast Highway two weeks ago, is also expected to discourage crime in the community.

Harbor Division officers can use the center as a substation for paperwork and lunch breaks, helping to increase police presence in the community.

Aamco Transmissions donated the building, which is full of other community gifts, including carpet, furniture, a refrigerator, a television and a vacuum cleaner.

The center is open Mondays and Wednesdays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays.